Chris Offutt - The Same River Twice - A Memoir

Shadrack was the first friend I’d had in years, and I decided to join him in Boston. He refused to take me in, saying I required too much psychic space. In Cambridge I interviewed with several “group houses” but my character betrayed me: I smoked, ate red meat, and was a Virgo — poor company to the enlightened. I dialed a number in a roommate tabloid and was interviewed at midnight by five insomniacs in Jamiaca Plain, known as J.P. They accepted me by unanimous decision, a fact that should have made me wary.

J.P. was considered one of Boston’s bad neighborhoods, wedged into a slight gap between two worse neighborhoods. Renovated condos chipped the perimeter, the children of the white flight returning for revenge. The elevated orange line connected everyone by air. I lived near the Green Street station, an area I was often warned against. To protect myself, I wore a scarred leather jacket and a permanent scowl. While walking home one night, I watched a couple cross the street to avoid me, and half a block later cross back. It was one of the better moments of my urban life. I felt vindicated for the general apprehension I carried in the street.

The rooming house was a prewar blight waiting to be renovated and peddled floor by floor. A pair of nitwits who called themselves “urban pioneers” owned the building but lived in fancy Back Bay. A Puerto Rican family lived on the ground floor. The father, Romero, raised chickens in the backyard, and was the manager of the building. He could kick us out at whim, a terrible prospect because when a man finds himself living in a rooming house, there is no place left to go.

Six of us shared a moldy bathroom and a rat-infested kitchen. One guy ran a bankrupt construction business out of the hallway. All day and night his employees drifted around, young Israelis and Irish with no papers. They waited for work in the living room, comparing wars and scars, unified by hunger, cold, and exile. I’ve never seen Jews and Christians get along better.

I hooked a job at the Lune Café as the only waiter for lunch. The small room contained nine tables, revolutionary posters, and an organic menu. The cook was an antique hippie who held himself off the floor by one arm pretzeled through elastic legs. He grunted his name, Orion, while attaining nirvana beside the stove. A scrawny woman of forty emerged from the basement. She told me she was in therapy and believed that all psychologists should wash dishes. It was better than tofu or primal screaming.

“I’ve washed plenty,” I said.

Dazzled by a sympathetic audience, she ranted for twenty minutes about the collective healing power of woman. She told me that the earliest Chinese ideograph for “male” also meant “selfish.” Orion unfolded and shape-shifted to a full headstand. His shirt fell open to reveal a belly tattoo of the Aztec Sunstone radiating from his navel. He remained inverted until J.P.’s lunch rush. White boys with dreadlocks sprawled across two tables. Men wore earrings; the women shaved their heads. Conversation was tense and urgent, A guy with no hands ordered a salad and ate it like an animal while reading the Daily Worker.

Orion folded each order into soggy sheafs of papyrus that passed for bread in honor of repressed peoples. A customer demanded to know the contents of each item, including the precise amount of spice. His voice was nasal.

“One pinch or two of thyme?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you allergic?”

“No,” came the smug reply, “I am macro.”

Later Orion drew intricate charts to explain a macrobiotic diet. Hitler ate no meat, but vegetarians are reluctant to accept him as their own. West Point won’t claim Benedict Arnold, and Kentuckians hate to admit that Charlie Manson was a native. No matter where you go, everyone says he’s from the next county over.

For the next several weeks I lived on raisins, hummus, tempeh, and rice. I lost weight. My nose ran like a sieve. I fell victim to hamburger cravings that Orion deemed a stopover along the path to enlightenment. The dishwasher quit to join a commune of women attempting isolation from men. She suggested I interview as a possible sperm donor because my kundalini was halfway along my chakras.

One morning I woke with an absolute revulsion for work. Determined to get fired, I skipped a shower and wore a plastic nose-and-glasses the entire shift. During the rush, I removed my shirt and pants, wearing only undershorts, a white apron, and the giant nose. People left enormous tips. Someone asked what band I played with. Enraged by my unprecedented failure to get fired, I ripped a sacred Che Guevara poster from the wall and folded it into a hat.

At three o’clock I quit, leaving a squad of neo-anarchists arguing the Spanish civil war over cinnamon espresso. Safely outside, I felt relief tingle my skin. Quitting a job was the last way I had to prove the existence of my own free will. I began planning my return to New York City. Manhattan and Eastern Kentucky both operated from a social anarchy that I could negotiate with ease and comfort. When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied that it would be a good idea.

I headed into the Combat Zone, where mobilization had replaced the shooting galleries and brothels. Junkies poked their arms inside a car window for a quick injection. Pimps drove vans with a mattress in the back and a whore up front. She opened the passenger door to display her wares, and if a guy liked the sight, he entered the van for a quick transaction while the pimp casually circled the block.

For economy’s sake I chose the bar with the most broken bulbs on its neon sign. The Minotaur’s door opened to the damp smell of musk and beer. A rotating mirror ball flicked bright specks onto a stage that held a jukebox smeared with greasy fingerprints. I chugged a beer as a woman plodded the stage, watching herself in the mirrored walls. A bruise marred her inner thigh. She seemed bored. The bartender argued with an old man holding a raincoat over his spindly lap. Finally he pulled the coat away, exposing not his genitals but a colostomy bag.

A woman squeezed beside me, rubbing warm breasts against my arm. A python twined her shoulder and arm, its tiny tongue licking the air. She was a human caduceus in charge of ailing men.

“What’s your snake’s name?” I yelled above the raucous music.

“Boots.”

“Good name.”

“He’s only the size of a belt, but he’ll grow.”

“That was Caligula’s childhood nickname.”

“Who?”

“Caligula.”

“Does he come in here?”

I shook my head.

“If anyone tries to make boots from Boots,” she said, “I’ll fucking kill them.”

Back room action cost fifty bucks, plus a twenty-five-dollar bottle of champagne to assure the club its cut. She said I could use a credit card. I had a two-dollar lingam and had no choice but to leave, feeling guilty, as if I’d rejected her good intentions. I told her, I’d be back later, not wanting her to know I was broke.

Outside, the air was different from a change in weather, one of the coast’s wily tricks. The sky was a gray flannel blanket like a water-color background with too much paint. Wind blew trash along the gutter. Dusk raised a full moon that looked as if it could be peeled away to leave a knothole in the sky. The moon was full as a tick, the mark of lunacy.

I recalled a man I’d known in New York who’d been lobotomized during the 1950s. He’d gone to Islip, Long Island, where the procedure was so popular that the town was nicknamed “Icepick.” Fifteen years later he was released from an institution and placed in my neighborhood. I once watched him trying to cross a busy intersection. He took two steps forward and one back, his movements never varying. He swung his arms and” tilted his head, and on each forward step, he’d say, “Green light. The light’s green.”